Astronomers Have Finally Solved The Mystery Of Those Weird Bright Spots On Ceres

12/12/2015

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Since NASA’s Dawn spacecraft took pictures of spooky
bright spots on the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres back in March, 2015, astronomers
and the public alike have been wondering over what could be producing them. Ice
deposits? Volcanoes? Geysers? But now we've at last got our hands on the actual
data from Dawn’s most recent fly-by, and different groups of scientists have
come up with a couple of interesting theories: the material that is giving
these spots their unique shine looks could be some sort of icy salt, and it comprises
deposits of ammonia-rich clays, which also provide clues about how Ceres
formed.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

So far NASA’s Dawn Spacecraft has spotted 130
craters like spots on the surface of Ceres. Dwarf Planet Ceres seems to harbor
deposits of a kind of pale white magnesium sulphate called hexahydrite. Alike
to Epsom salt, hexahydrite procedures fibrous, flaky layers on the exterior of
rocks, and though hardly seen on Earth, it can be found around the Cave of Saint Ignatius in Manresa, Spain. Grounded on data obtained from Dawn’s framing
camera, the scientists suspect that the salt-rich spots on Ceres made back when
water-ice sublimated underneath the surface thanks to asteroid impacts.

According to the research paper publishes in Nature,
the simplest explanation is that the sublimation procedure of water ice initiate
after a combination of ice and salt minerals is uncovered by an impact, which pierces
the insulating dark upper crust.

Simply observable against the naturally dark surface
of the dwarf planet, these bright spots emit an extensive range of brightness,
with some of them reflecting up to 50 percent of the sunlight.

Another team led by Maria Cristina De Sanctis from
Italy's National Institute of Astrophysics has proclaimed the finding of
ammonia-rich clays in the surface material of Ceres. By means of data from
Dawn’s visible and infrared mapping spectrometer, the scientists define how
ammonia ice would vanish in the atmosphere of Ceres, but if chemically bound to
other minerals, it could stay in a stable form on the surface.

NASA says "The presence of ammoniated compounds
raises the possibility that Ceres did not originate in the main asteroid belt
between Mars and Jupiter, where it currently resides, but instead might have
formed in the outer Solar System. Another idea is that Ceres formed close to
its present position, incorporating materials that drifted in from the outer
solar system - near the orbit of Neptune, where nitrogen ices are thermally
stable."

De Sanctis told Maddie Stone at Gizmodo "The
results are quite unexpected. We are now analysing the data taken at higher
resolution that could reveal more details about the variegation in composition
of the surface."